


Knock knock who's there?

by TrexReach100



Series: The Lardo & Shitty Chronicles [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Lardo is low key twitterpated, Law school is hard, lardo is a best bro, shitty is twitterpated, surprise visits late at night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 12:46:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10536750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrexReach100/pseuds/TrexReach100
Summary: It starts with a joke but this ain't no punchline.





	

Shitty’s phone buzzes next to him just before he face plants into the thickest textbook he’s ever had the pleasure of hauling home.

 **Lardo:** Knock Knock.

His grin is reflexive.

 **Shitty:** Who’s there?

A knock on his actual door startles him.  He glances from the chipboard partition, that would be satisfactory in keeping all the hallway noise out if his walls weren’t so thin and his neighbour so fond of German house music, to his phone.  The three little bubbles of an impending reply hover below his but then they vanish.

The knocking comes again.

Sighing, Shitty gives a regretful – honestly – (he hates studying but he does feel bad stopping) look to his homework and rises from the chair to answer the door.

His phone vibrates on the desk as he turns the handle and throws the door back.

Lardo’s standing there.

Larissa Duan is standing there in all her glory.

Dark hair tucked under a knit cap that’s – yes that is his, and her beautiful lips, strawberry lip balm red, curved into a beaming smile.  Her eyes are soft, her eyeliner’s melted into the creases beneath and her pupils are wide in the dim light.  In fact all of her looks soft, from her hat (his), to her oversized sweatshirt (Jack’s), to the woolly hiking socks folded over the ankles of her boots.  He wants to scoop her up and squeeze her tight like senor bun.  Except he can’t move and the longer he looks at her the harder it is to see her because she’s sort of wavering in front of him like she’s shaking, or behind a wall of water.  When his eyes start to sting and the back of his throat throbs Shitty realises he wants to cry.

Law school is hard okay and he’s missed his best bro.

Her smile falters.  “Dude are you okay?”

He’s been missing everyone chronic for weeks.  Technically he’s only just over an hour away but to go from seeing your best friends every day to seeing them once a week at best- but more like twice every month because he’s buried under so much revision he’s contemplated just lining the wall with the pages to see if the absorption method works for him- it’s difficult.  It’s an adjustment.  He’s made it before at Andover but he feels less resilient as an adult.  Set in his ways like an old man, resistant to change and hesitant to embrace it’s curves.  Maybe he felt this way before and just doesn’t remember or maybe he feels it like heartache this time because he really found his people at Samwell.  For all it’s objection to being like any other high school (because you weren’t paying all that tuition for something so common as a regular education) Andover was like any other high school.  Socially speaking at least.  Friendships of convenience took up the first three years, friendships of choice only happening during the last when it was just long enough to feel real but too short to really hold on to them.  He still keeps in touch with some of those final year friends but when he thinks of them and he thinks of the team the feelings aren’t the same.  How he feels about his team is completely different to how he feels about the casual Andover friends, even if he ends up calling them for connections in the next few years.

The feelings for Samwell are huge and deep and unlike anything he ever thought he would or could feel and because of this he feels the distance between him and them keenly

He skypes Jack twice every week but it only makes him feel more homesick for the chaotic days at the Haus.  There is nobody on this campus in his building that he would feel comfortable sitting naked on the bed of.  There is no one on this campus in his building who would feel comfortable letting him.  His family keep telling him that the time to get serious is now, in college it was okay to dick about a bit but Harvard Law does not tolerate silly buggers.  Which is ridiculous because what do they expect is going to happen when they work their students near to death but don’t provide them with an outlet to cut loose that doesn’t happen in a bar surrounded by people you don’t want to make a bad impression in front of?

Squeeze someone from top and bottom and all they do is leak out at the sides.  No human person can withstand that much pressure without popping some screws.

Calling Lardo is almost worse.  Having to say the words goodbye at the end are torture, and even though hearing her voice is a lullaby on his ragged nerves all the images and feelings it conjures leave him living in fear of the moment their conversations end.  So much so that he starts to dread it from the moment she picks up.  The fear of how awful it will feel to hang up stops him from fully investing himself in the moment and for the last three phone calls it’s made him feel like utter shit to notice that Lardo has noticed his absent mind.

“I know this is a surprise and I should have probably called but…I brought Brownies.” She rummages in her bag to take them out but Shitty reaches for her, sliding his arm around her waist and bringing her close.  Her bag bashes into the door frame.  He cups her face in his palm feeling the chill of her smooth cheek.  Shitty has imagined a moment like this a thousand times.  What would she feel like in his arms with this intention? How would she react? Frozen and stiff or soft and melty? What would she say to him? Anything at all? Would she push him away or just gasp like she’s wanted this as badly as he has for years?

He didn’t know whether this moment would be at Samwell or when they met up for breaks or at games when he and Jack visited.  He didn’t know whether this moment would ever happen.

He imagined all the scenarios just so he could be prepared.

But for all his day dreaming he didn’t imagine it’d be halfway out into his dorm hallway with tears of relief and happiness in his eyes.  Realistically he should have expected something with a little less poetry and a little more truth but realism has no place in a fantasy.

He could go on about the logistics and rules of fantasies but he can’t because he’s got Lardo in his arms and she isn’t pushing him away.  She isn’t stiff and frozen but neither is she warm and melty.

He drops his hand from her face as soon as he realises but he does hug her tightly, not in a sexual way of course, in a ‘oh my god I’ve missed you so much bro’ way with his face hooked over her shoulder and her arms wrapped around him all comforting.  The kind of way they’re used to touching.  Close but not close enough to ruin the delicate dance of denial about the feelings they both know they have for one another.

She feels as soft in his embrace as she looks.

“God Lards,” His sigh melts him into the hug, “I missed you so much.”

Lardo curls the fingers of one hand into his short ‘law school appropriate’ hair.  “I missed you too.  So much.” She sighs sounding equally affected.

They both pull back but neither make a move to free themselves from their tangled limbs.  Shitty can see her better now the tears have cleared and she is so beautiful.  The shaved side of her hair is growing out fuzzy and it tickled his cheek.  The long side is plaited over her shoulder tied off with a bright elastic that looks like the ones Chowder puts on his brace brackets.  He lets his gaze flick from her rich warm brown eyes to her soft strawberry lips.  He does it once, twice, three times before she licks them and says,

“Yes.”

Shitty hesitates.  “Yes?”

“Kiss me,” she whispers tentatively.  Breathless. “Please?”

Shitty doesn’t need to be asked twice…well okay he was asked twice but this is explicit consent and so he lowers his head until he’s a mere whisper away from her mouth.  He can smell her lip balm and it drives him forwards.

Shitty’s kissed a lot of people in his lifetime.  There was that brief moment in the last half of sophomore year when he realised he was dangerously close to falling in love with Lards and he thought the best way to get over her was to get under someone else.  It did not work, obviously.

Shitty has placed his lips upon a lot of lips but nobody’s lips compare to hers.  He didn’t really ever think they could.  He told himself to take her off the pedestal but she’s been up there the whole time swinging her legs gaily looking down at him, promising him gold with her smile.

Lardo’s lips are soft and supple and tasty.  He’s dreamt of kissing her since the moment they met but there was always a risk that the dream wouldn’t live up to the reality.  That in working so hard to have nothing more than a friendly ‘you’re my bro, bro’ relationship they’d actually achieve it and when they kissed Shitty would be thinking ‘this isn’t right’ as opposed to thinking ‘this is everything to me and I can’t believe I’m inhabiting my body right now’.

But it is the disbelieving feeling, the feeling of doubt that anything in this world could feel as good as he and Lardo kissing _finally_ and he is overjoyed (and overwhelmingly relieved) that these feelings fall into the latter category.

He’s about to sweep his tongue across her bottom lip to take this kiss to the next level when she breaks away.

Shitty feels the cold sweep of air between them immediately.  His mouth is tingly and his chest feels like it’s trying to exists in too much space.  Lardo’s breathing hard, her chest heaving with it but she doesn’t say anything just grabs the strap of her bag.  He holds his breath and tries to brace himself for what she may say or do next.  He thinks it’ll kill him if she says she regrets this.  If she laughs and says something like;

_“Wow that was weird, actually.”_

It would hurt but just because his heart was dancing in her chest, just because his blood was rushing around like he’d been shot gunning lines didn’t mean Lardo’s was.  It took two to tango. 

Two bodies, two brains and two thought processes.

Shallow breathed he watches as she ducks out from under the strap of her bag, drops it on the floor where it lands with a thud, and then launches herself back into his arms.  His arms moving to catch her is as automatic as her decision to wrap her legs round his waist.They start sweet as before savouring the simple feeling of connection but it lasts all of three seconds before Lardo’s licking his bottom lip and he opens his mouth letting her sweep her tongue in, exploring all Shitty has to offer, pushing her body even closer, pressing her softs breasts to his firm chest.  He groans, its unintentional and he flushes with embarrassment but Lardo doesn’t pull back to laugh, she doesn’t stop kissing him.

Part of him never wants this to end but the bigger part of him, the part that wants to breathe – not _that_ part- has him breaking their kiss with a shuddering gasp.

Both of them stare into each others eyes panting like they’ve just sprinted uphill.

Eventually Lardo swallows, a wry smile tipping up the corner of her kiss plump lips and says, “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

Shitty laughs breathlessly, “Yeah.” He steps back into his apartment and shuts the door behind him.

Five minutes later Shitty steps back out in the hallway, boxers exposed in the loose v of his unbuckled pants to swipe up Lardo’s abandoned bag.

**Author's Note:**

> Love omgcheckplease and more? Come screech with me over at [fanaste](http://fanaste.tumblr.com)


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